Mmmmm, not my finest hour in the kitchen this morning, or hours more like, felt like the morning was never going to end - I'm not quite sure what happened, I was in early but it was all a bit of a disaster - perhaps yesterday's kuku was taking a moment of revenge and putting me in his place, you know headless and running around like a right idiot.
I started with white yeast bread, just because I felt I really had to do it again but when it came time for the dough to have it's first nap of the morning, the hot cupboard wasn't yet on, my fault, should have checked it I suppose so by the time it was warm enough and ready, the dough had to be re-kneaded, lovely, at least it would have used up a few more calories. Not the brightest of starts...................
Then it was onto Bantry Irish Stew with turnips and parsnips and the latter only arrived at 10h30 so that set me back a bit too, was brilliant in the end though and God, it was a miserable day so the perfect thing for lunch.
And then only had to make meringue in a swiss roll tin and roll it up as a roulade, shove it full of Chantilly cream and strawberries and eventually top it birthday candles and it went out to the dining room at lunch time as a birthday cake for Fiona, so sweet, looked quite good in the end - lashings of icing sugar to hide all the cracks but honestly, it's impossible to roll meringue without it cracking like a socking big fault line, I've never been so into garnish, there were strawberries and cream all over the show and enough icing sugar flying about to get the weather service worried about a blizzard.
Made a bit of raspberry fool as well which is basically just raspberries with sugar, blended, sieved to get rid of the pips (and do my head in later trying to clean the sieve...............the less said, the better) and then lastly pints of whipped cream folded through to create a sort of ripple effect, it was very pretty.
In between all this there were several visits to the heating cupboard to look forlornly at my bread, knead it a few more dozen times and finally shape it into a couple of rolls and a 5 plait loaf, moving ever onwards and upwards from the 3 plait number I first tried a couple of weeks ago - looked lovely in the end but my brain was a bit taxed with the whole 5 ropes of dough needing to be wound around each other malarkey.
And at last it was over, well after 13h00 though - I just gulped down a bit of my presentation plates and headed straight to Demo, what a day! Completely forgot to take any pics, organisation skills were a little lacking today I'm afraid.
Demo was with Darina and there were some delish things on the list today - my favourite, a vegetable curry with yoghrt and coconut milk but so much nicer than anything I've managed to make before, and then a Thai green curry with mushrooms, cauliflower, aubergine, zucchini and lots of coconut milk, yum.
There was a chilled cucumber soup and cucumber mousse with salsa, I'm not a huge fan of cold soups to be honest but this was quite good, masses of cream and yoghurt which probably helped everything along.
Darina also made some small Indian flat breads to go with the curry and asked for volunters to roll out the rest of the dough after she'd shown us a couple - they looked horribly like tortillas which still haunt my dreams and I kept horribly still until a few others had offered to do it, took ages and when we took a short break a bit later (and they were still rolling) they mumbled that they were definitely as bad as the tortillas, so hope they're not on my list for Thursday!!
For pud there were two fab, fab cakes - a rustic plum tart with a caramel topping and an apple fudge cake, so good!
For the most part, conversation at the moment centres around the upcoming exam on Friday - for the herb test we'll each have 10 herbs and 10 salad greens to identify and suggest 2 recipes for each from our reportoire to date................all fine for the common herbs but if I get something dodgy like Borage or Lemon Verbena or something, well let's put it like this, I've spent the evening staring at a herb book, cross referencing against recipes and hoping for divine inspiration.................!
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